This paper reveals that the class of affine term structure models introduced by Duffie and Kan (1996) is much larger than it has been usually considered in the literature. We study "fundamental" risk factors, which represent multivariate risk aversion of the consumer volatility matrix of the...

This pap er intro duces a general framework for market mo dels, namedM arket M o del Approach, through the concept of admissible sets of for-ward swap rates spanning a given tenor structure. We relate this conceptto results in graph theory by showing that a set is admissible if and only ifthe...

This paper introduces a time-inhomogeneous parameterization of the forward LIBOR volatilities and analyzes its implications for the valuation of Bermudan swaptions. The model approximates the actual term structure of volatilities with a curve from a given set defined by the parametric...

Due to their underlying assumptions, the standard concepts of risk aversion and preference for the present are generally defined separately and represented by scalar measures, and this implies many shortcomings. More specifically, if measured by a scalar, the risk aversion remains unchanged,...

We investigate the theoretical and empirical difference between thestandard convexity adjustment and Forward Libor Model in a particular case oftwo-period Constant Maturity Swaps. Using daily data from 1991 to 1997, wesimulate the difference (spread) between the two-period CMS swap rates...

Credit Default Swaps (CDS) are in the process of becoming, liquid and extremelyinformative instruments of default risk. Yet, default swap market has severalnovel aspects that have not received much attention. In this paper we studyan aspect of CDS´s that relates to the prediction of financial...

In this note the pricing of options on credit default swaps using the survival-measure -pricing technique is discussed. In particular, we derive amodification of the famous Black (1976) futures pricing formula which appliesto options on CDS, and show how other pricing formulae can be easily...

Markowitz and Sharpe won the Nobel Prize in Economics more than a decade ago for the development of Mean-Variance analysis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). In the year 2002, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for the development of Prospect Theory. Can these two apparently...

We study the equilibrium pricing sects of a sentiment for pessimism. Pessimism has the form of Knightian model uncertainty aversion for a neighborhood of indistinguishable model specifications that are constrained in their relative entropy from a given reft ence model. We fully characterise the...